Speak the World -- a poem

Can I be a voice for the world?
Can I be anything else?

Are we not all
a voice, really the voice
for the world?

I begin writing today,
after months of silence.

After months even years
of searching for other
means of expressing
who I am
and where I fit.

But I don’t fit in . . .

I don’t belong in any group:
Catholic, Buddhist, Jewish, New Age, Integral . . .

Not even Nomadic . . .

So, I can only speak me
and so speak the world.

Copyright (c) Jeff Wild, 2006

New Edition of Deleuze Journal

AV - the MMU ERI Journal for Deleuzian Studies featuring papers by leading academics in the field of Deleuzian Studies and artwork inspired by Deleuze's writing -- Volume 2

In this issue it features:

• a key note paper from the ‘Re–Mapping Deleuze' conference held at Cornerhouse, Manchester, in September 2005: “The Secret of Theory" by Professor Claire Colebrook (University of Edinburgh)
  
• and a from the current Series of Human Sciences Seminars, which was advertised in this series with the working title "Subject and Self in Deleuze and Heidegger" but can be seen here with the reworked title "The Pure and Empty Form of Death: Deleuze and Heidegger" by Ray Brassier (Middlesex University).

Deleuze's ABC Primer (E)

"E as in 'Enfance' (Childhood)"

Parnet says that it seems that, for Deleuze, his childhood really has little importance. Deleuze responds, yes, necessarily so. He considers the writing activity to have nothing to do with an individual affair, not something personal or a small private affair. Writing is becoming, he says, becoming-animal, becoming child, and one writes for life, to become something, whatever one wants except becoming a writer and except an archive.

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Note that these are my excerpts. The entire text of the discussinon is available online at Gilles Deleuze's ABC Primer, with Claire Parnet.

Deleuze's ABC Primer (D)

"D as in Desire"
Since Deleuze is considered to be, says Parnet, a philosopher of desire, so what is it?

Deleuze starts by saying that "it's not what people thought it was, even then. It was a big ambiguity and a big misunderstanding, or rather a little one." . . . So as philosophers, Deleuze with Guattari saw their task as that of proposing a new concept of desire. And concepts, despite what some people think, refer to things that are extremely simple and concrete.

What they meant to express was the simplest thing in the word [sic]: until now, you speak abstractly about desire because you extract an object supposed to be the object of desire. Deleuze emphasizes that one never desires something or someone, but rather always desires an aggregate (ensemble). So they asked what was the nature of relations between elements in order for there to be desire, for these elements to become desirable. Deleuze refers to Proust when he says that desire for a woman is not so much desire for the woman as for a paysage, a landscape, that is enveloped in this woman. Or in desiring an object, a dress for example, the desire is not for the object, but for the whole context, the aggregate, "I desire in an aggregate." Deleuze refers back to the letter "B", on drinking, alcohol, and the desire not just for drink, but for whatever aggregate into which one situates the desire for drinking (with people, in a café, etc.).

So, there is no desire, says Deleuze, that does not flow into an assemblage, and for him, desire has always been a constructivism, constructing an assemblage (agencement), an aggregate: the aggregate of the skirt, of a sun ray, of a street, of a woman, of a vista, of a color... constructing an assemblage, constructing a region, assembling. . . . So every time someone says, I desire this or that, that person is in the process of constructing an assemblage, nothing else, desire is nothing else.

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Note that these are my excerpts. The entire text of the discussinon is available online at Gilles Deleuze's ABC Primer, with Claire Parnet.

Omnibenevolence and Deleuze

In a recent post on my other blog, Talmudic Questionings, I discussed the idea of "omnibenevolence" as a potential for each of us.

I believe that if Deleuze understood this idea as coming from traditional religion, he would either be very suspicious or simply reject it. However, I wonder if "omnibenevolence" could be one of the possible "lines of flight," one of the experiments we are encouraged to live by Deleuze. One of the ways we can be challenged to be more and discover more about ourselves.

At the end of Todd May's wonderful book Gilles Deleuze: An Introduction, he writes:

Deleuze's ontology is not a resting place; it is not a zone of comfort; it is not an answer that allows us to abandon our seeking. It is the opposite. An ontology of difference is a challenge. To recognize that there is more than we have been taught, that what is presented to us is only the beginning of what there is, puts before us the greater task of our living. We have not finished with living; we are never finished with living. However we live, there is always more. We do not know of what a body is capable, nor how it can live. The alternatives of contentment (I have arrived) and hopelessness (There is nowhere to go) are two sides of the same misguided thought: that what is presented to us is what there is.

There is more, always more.

Perhaps this notion of "omnibenevolence" is part of the challenge to "recognize that there is more" and that "we are never finished with living" and along that same line of flight -- we are never finished with loving . . .

Deleuze's ABC Primer (C)

"C as in Culture"
Parnet asks what it means for Deleuze to "être cultivé" (be cultivated, cultured). She reminds him that he has said that he is not "cultivé", that he usually reads, sees movies, observes things only as a function of a particular ongoing project.

He says that he sees this as part of his investment in being "on the lookout" (être aux aguets; cf. "A comme Animal"). He adds that he doesn't believe in culture, rather he believes in encounters (rencontres), but these encounters don't occur with people. People think that it's with other people that encounters take place, like among intellectuals at colloquia. Encounters occur, rather, with things, with a painting, a piece of music.

When one does philosophy, for instance, remaining "in" philosophy is also to get out of philosophy. This doesn't mean to do something else, but to get out while remaining within, not necessarily by writing a novel. Deleuze says he'd be unable to, in any event, but even if he could, it would be completely useless. Deleuze says that he gets out of or beyond philosophy by means of philosophy.

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Note that these are my excerpts. The entire text of the discussinon is available online at Gilles Deleuze's ABC Primer, with Claire Parnet.

The value of vagueness

Overall, I deeply and profoundly think we (meaning the whole planet) take ourselves TOO SERIOUSLY and that is why these lines about Deleuze's thought from John Rajchman's book The Deleuze Connections have struck me so strongly:

"Our lives must be indefinite or vague enough to include such potential for other worlds of predications or individualizations, and so enter into complications with others that are never fully 'explicated.' The vagueness of 'a life' is thus not a deficiency to be corrected, but rather a resource or reserve of other possibilities, our connections.

It appears to me that the deeply felt need to be right, to hold on to one's own identified world view without interest in another's perspective is one of the foundational causes of so much tragedy and suffering in our world today. I think this concept of "vaugeness" can help loosen the hold of righteousness and fundamentalism.

Deleuze's ABC Primer (B)

"B as in _Boire/Boisson_ [Drink]"
Parnet asks what it meant for Deleuze to drink when he used to drink. Deleuze muses that he used to drink a lot, but had to stop for health reasons. Drinking, he says, is a question of quantity.

Drink and drugs are not required in order to work, but their only justification would be if they did help one to work, even at the risk of one's health. Deleuze refers to American writers, cites Thomas Wolfe, Fitzgerald, as a "série d'alcoolique" (alcoholic series). Drinking helped them to perceive that something which is too strong in life.

Deleuze says he used to think that drinking helped him create philosophical concepts, but then he realized it didn't help him at all.

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Note that these are my excerpts. The entire text of the discussinon is available online at Gilles Deleuze's ABC Primer, with Claire Parnet.

New Deleuzian Journal -- Actual Virtual

Check out this new journal for Deleuzian studies -- Actual Virtual -- January 2006

Each issue will feature papers by leading academics in the field of Deleuzian Studies and artwork inspired by Deleuze's writing.

The first issue features two papers from the recent conference ‘Re–Mapping Deleuze' held at Cornerhouse, Manchester, in September 2005: Entrancing Time by Dr Anna Powell (Manchester Metropolitan University) and Diagrammatic Actualism by Dr John Mullarkey (Dundee University). We also feature the film Rhizomtic 1# which captures a squatted art and community space organised by the anarchist collective SPOR and directed by Matt Lee.

The aim AV is twofold. To provide current Deleuzian academic research papers presented as they were meant to be seen... rather than publishing the written word, each paper is filmed by the TMF production company and presented here as streamed movies. To provide a platform for Deleuzian inspired artworks across the international Deleuzian community.

Deleuze's ABC Primer (A)

Available online is Gilles Deleuze's ABC Primer, with Claire Parnet -- for the next number of days I will be sharing excerpts with my highlighting from this site -- hoping to deepen my appreciation of this text.

"A as in Animal"
In philosophy, he says, the invention of a barbaric word is sometimes necessary to take account of a new notion: so there would be no territorialization without a vector of leaving the territory, deterritorialization, and there's no leaving the territory, no deterritorialization, without a vector of reterritorialization elsewhere.

In animals, these territories are expressed and delimited by an endless emission of signs, reacting to signs (e.g. a spider and its web) and producing signs (e.g. a wolf track or something else), recognized by hunters and trackers in a kind of animal relationship.

Here Parnet wonders if there is a connection between this emission of signs, territory, and writing. Deleuze says that they are connected by living an existence "aux aguets", "être aux aguets," always being on the lookout, like an animal, like a writer, a philosopher, never tranquil, always looking back over one's shoulder. One writes for readers, "for" meaning "à l'attention de," toward them, to their attention. But also, one writes for non-readers, that is, "for" meaning "in the place of," as did Artaud in saying he wrote for the illiterate, for idiots, in their place.

Deleuze argues that thinking that writing is some tiny little private affair is shameful; rather, writing means throwing oneself into a universal affair, be it a novel or philosophy. Parnet refers parenthetically to Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of Lord Chandos by Hoffmanstahl in A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze says that writing means pushing the language, the syntax, all the way to a particular limit, a limit that can be a language of silence, or a language of music, or a language that's, for example, a painful wailing (cf. Kafka's Metamorphosis).

Deleuze argues that it's not men, but animals, who know how to die, and he returns to cats, how a cat seeks a corner to die in, a territory for death. Thus, the writer pushes language to the limit of the cry, of the chant, and a writer is responsible for writing "for", in the place of, animals who die, even by doing philosophy. Here, he says, one is on the border that separates thought from the non-thought.

Notes on nomadics (2)

Nomadics -- Negatives
chaotic; leaderless; directionless; practiceless; concerned about newness for newness’ sake; destructive of tradition; rootless; lonely; pathless; easy to get lost (though can one get lost, when one is a nomad?)

Nomadics -- Positives
freshness; creativity; openness; movement; lively; evolutionary; encompassing; not rejecting of any moments; at home everywhere; representatives: Kazantzakis, Bergson, Deleuze, Berman, Eco, Kauffman, Heidegger . . .

Notes on nomadics (1)

focus on the creative
the new
the rhizome not the root

no set path
though all paths can be “raided” for necessities and treasures

constant movement
constant correction
constant rebirth

constantly making connections
new connections for new possibilities
new life

no authorities
no organization

love of the new
the possible of all the connections
that create the world new every moment

humility to the unknown and unknowable
surrender to the creative
embracing of the virtual and the unthinkable next moment

nomad poetics